I traveled to San Francisco in early March, making my first official “work trip” since I got sick last year. I attended the Game Developers Conference, a relentlessly nerdy gathering that I’ve been going to for over 10 years now. The weather in San Francisco in March is usually gray and grim during the GDC. Not this year. This year the days were unseasonably sunny and warm and curiously optimistic.

On Tuesday morning I attended an appointment with my cameraman in the Courtyard Marriott (299 2nd Street). As the two of us waited for our elevator to arrive, a flock of suitcase-rolling stewardesses suddenly gathered in the nearby lobby. They chattered noisily in a language that I didn’t understand. Their uniforms, head to toe, were a most unusual color: robin’s egg blue.

“Excuse me,” I said to the stewardesses. I felt the jolt of adrenaline that a man can feel when he’s unexpectedly addressing a gaggle of stewardesses on a Tuesday morning in a hotel lobby in a strange city. Men: If you find yourself in this situation, do not under any circumstances pass it up. Always address the gaggle of stewardesses. Even if you look within yourself and realize that you do not have enough courage to do this, go ahead and do it anyway. There are always benefits to trying, no matter what the outcome turns out to be.

The stewardesses, realizing that I was talking to them—or, more accurately, trying to talk to them—stopped chattering. They looked at me with blank expressions on their gorgeous faces. “Excuse me,” I playfully said, “but I wanted to tell you that your uniforms are a very beautiful color.”

The color really was beautiful to me. Blue has been my color since I was a little kid.

I asked them what airline they were from. The gaggle didn’t say anything to me for what felt like a long time. Instead of saying anything, they tilted their coiffured heads, which I suspected meant that they were trying to figure out who I was and why I was speaking to them. If I’d been 10 years younger and less secure about myself as a man, I would have gone to pieces in this moment. But I’m older now, and I went through a hell of a goddamned thing in 2014, and I decided last year, after the hell of a goddamned thing was finally behind me, that I wasn’t going to go to pieces ever again. Not for women. Not for anything.

One of the women stepped forward. She was obviously the boldest of the gaggle, the one who was most comfortable in her own skin. “Thank you for your lovely compliment!” she said. Her eyes were an icy blue color, far lighter than the color of her uniform. Her face was defined by a pair of precipitously steep cheek bones. She was gigantic, on the verge of being huge. She was taller than I was. This woman, I realized, was taller and sturdier-looking than any of the men in my family, especially on my father’s side. My father’s side, the Jones side, has always been lilliputian.

The woman told me what airline she and the other gaggle members were with. I don’t remember what airline she said, probably because I was very excited simply to be talking to her. Then she invited me to fly said airline one day. Which, I suppose, is the generic way that stewardesses are trained to address strangely talkative middle-aged men in the lobbies of Courtyard Marriotts.

I thanked her, and wished her and the rest of her uniformed gaggle a good day. Then I got into the elevator, along with my adrenaline jolt and my cameraman. I felt pretty good about myself.

As we rode in silence up to the 15th floor, I involuntarily reached for my phone, the way that I do dozens of times each day. But this time was different. This time I discovered that my phone was somehow no longer on my person.

The cameraman and I exited the elevator. I gave myself a frantic, head-to-toe pat down. Nothing. I performed the frantic pat-down a second time.

Still nothing.

An oily despair gathered in the pit of my stomach. “I think my phone is gone,” I said. The cameraman, a dedicated problem-solver and all around nice guy, promptly dialed my phone number on his phone. Then the two of us stood there, our ears straining to hear a muted ring or maybe to feel a muted vibration coming from somewhere on my person.

But there was nothing but the soft rush of air from the tiny vents above our heads.

I searched the bottom of my messenger bag, all the way down in the netherworld—the place where sunlight never reaches. I found Canadian nickels. And dry-cleaning receipts. And a gathering of stray Werther’s Originals. But the search was futile; the phone was not here anymore. I could somehow feel that the phone wasn’t here anymore.

I didn’t know where it was, but it wasn’t here.

Goddamn it all.

I was about to go on a journey that I didn’t want to go on. I knew that I was about to go on a journey in this moment. Right from the start of this journey, before it even really began, there was a part of me that figured that the worse-case scenario was that I would eventually wind up at the Apple Store on Stockton Street—which was only a few short blocks away from the Courtyard Marriott that we were currently standing in—and purchase a new phone for $600, or whatever the damn things cost these days. Even during the first moments of this reluctant “hunt,” I wondered if I should simply go ahead and fast-forward to the inevitable “Apple Store conclusion” and spend the $600 and get on with my day and my life instead of going through the longer, and probably pointless and painful experience that I was about to go through.

I went through with it.

Of course I went through with it.